Intel Doubles Down on University Research

Makers of computer chips realized long ago that funding basic research at universities was a lot less expensive than doing it in company labs. Intel has been particularly active on campus, and plans to step up its game.

Reuters

The Silicon Valley giant on Wednesday said it will pump $100 million into universities over the next five years to fund roughly a half-dozen campus centers that will focus on research in computing and communications. Though more of a restructuring of Intel’s research efforts than an increase in its total spending, the company says the dollars from the unit known as Intel Labs that will actually reach university researchers will increase five-fold.

Stanford University will host the first center, a hub for collaboration with researchers at seven other institutions. The focus will be “visual computing” technologies, a catchall phrase that includes technology to process 3-D graphics, video and other images.

Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, was quick to suggest that the announcements dovetail with President Obama’s call Tuesday night to make America more competitive in basic research. He also mentioned that universities have been rocked by sharp budget cuts that make it hard for them to start their own new programs.

“Intel is trying to do its part to help the universities move beyond the recession and really be part of the recovery,” he said during a conference call.

Each center will get $2.5 million a year for five years from Intel, which will also pay the salaries of four of its own researchers that will be based on campus. It doesn’t sound like a great deal of money, unless one considers the small amounts that researchers tend to receive–a key reason university research is so cost-effective.

Pat Hanrahan, a Stanford University professor who will co-head the new center on its campus, said the money from Intel will support 30 faculty members and 50 graduate students at the eight institutions that will collaborate on the effort. “These are some of the brightest minds in the United States,” he said, noting that many are likely to go on to create technology startups. “The return on this investment is going to be enormous.”

Among the ideas being explored by the Stanford center, Hanrahan said, are ways to make it easier for everyday computer users to create richer images; advances in lifelike simulation, such as virtual people with realistic behavior and clothes; synthezing sounds and creating 3-D models in new ways based on photos and video.

It should be noted that Intel is not the only chip maker with deep connections to Stanford. Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of rival Nvidia and a holder of a degree from the university, donated $30 million to fund a new engineering center on campus that bears his name. The graphics chip specialist is also a founding supporter of a Stanford center called the Pervasive Parallelism Lab, whose affiliates include Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

Like many of the latest university-business collaborations, Intel and Stanford stressed that the latest effort won’t come with any of the potential strings attached that have sometimes created friction in academia. The company gets no special rights to any intellectual property generated by the programs, and researchers can openly publish and share their findings. Rattner said Intel is also open to letting other companies help fund and participate in the projects, though discussions with potential partners have not yet resulted in any agreements.

Bill Dally, who is Nvidia’s chief scientist and the former chairman of Stanford’s computer-science department, said joint efforts tend to work better than those funded by a single company–because there is less incentive to product the research into areas that would bring a short-term payoff for one firm. “They tend to focus more on the long term,” he said. “It’s a win-win for everybody.”